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Background:

In today’s scholastic journalism rooms, staffs are always looking for ways to finance their technological needs. So to help, the Endowment Committee announced at the 2014 SIPA Convention, the first SIPA Endowment Technology Grant.

The $500 grant would be awarded to a SIPA member school to purchase technology software or hardware, and the grant winner’s adviser would speak at the following year’s convention to show how the technology was used, or if coming to the convention was not possible, the adviser would write an article for schopressonline.org.

The 2014 grant winner was the yearbook staff at Wellington HS in Florida. Mary Inglis, adviser, was able to purchase hardware items that helped the staff stay current despite the age of their computers.

Comment about applying for the grant from last year’s recipient, Mary Inglis at Wellington HS (Fla.):

“I would encourage anyone to apply for the SIPA Technology Grant. The part that takes the most time is: 1. figuring out what you need to improve your existing condition, and 2. shopping around on the Internet to find it at the right price. I involved our tech person and my yearbook rep in the process. If you go to web-based design, there are certain things your IT person has to do to make sure it happens. The SIPA paperwork is very do-able. We had 2002 eMacs that looked like spaceships plus InDesign CS2 on them because they couldn’t handle anything higher. When one parent found out I had applied for the grant to upgrade memory and get bigger monitors, he donated 7 HP machines from his warehouse. While they are not the latest and greatest, they took the memory and are perfect vehicles to the Internet where we access an online design program through our printer. It was the tipping point to making our yearbook room a real, functional publishing room. We have, in addition to the online design web based program, InDesign CS6 through our district, which I use for projects for them after the yearbook is done. Everyone has access to InDesign and to the web. So, my grant was used for memory and for two large monitors, with help from a couple of parents.”